What is community development and why are we doing it? Fourteen years of practice and I am still having conversations about these very questions. I have not had a good enough understanding to clearly and convincingly explain the answer to someone in the street. Many other practitioners, past and present, have expressed similar confusions. This is not an accident. Community development is a practice which has been ‘contested’ for many years and there are strong claims from policy makers, practitioners and communities for what they understand and want it to be.

Having described the changing context for community development in the previous chapter, we focus in this chapter on the fundamentals of community development: what practitioners are trying to do, why and how. It is important to do this in order to assess the role that community development practitioners play today. We begin by discussing the differing aims of community development on which practice has focused. Tensions exist over the aims and we highlight how these tensions have been played out, exploring the role that values have had in assisting practitioners to manage contradictions and dilemmas. We then outline the key approaches to work with communities and look in particular at the period of the Home Office community development project (CDP), and how this affected subsequent practice. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the training that is provided for community development practitioners and how successful it has been in offering to practitioners what they need to deal with the contradictions inherent in their practice.

To locate the reader in the late 1960s, I have chosen to refer to a seminal report of that time, Community work and social change (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1968), usually referred to as the Gulbenkian Report. Funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the report was the product of a two-year study into the nature and extent of community work, carried out by a group of academics and administrators. While there were other reports to which we could contrast the role of community development, for example, the Seebohm Report (1968), the Gulbenkian Report is widely regarded as a key driver for community development.